ID Magazine's Daily Display Week 2016 News

Friday, May 27, 2016

In recent years, virtual reality has moved from science
fiction movies, to academic research labs, to product development in the
industry, and finally into the hands of consumers in the real world. A number
of marquee devices have been launched in the market along with some compelling
immersive applications. At the same time, some cool augmented reality devices
and developer kits have been released as well. The pace of progress in both
virtual and augmented reality technologies has been rapid.

So, in line with this fast-emerging trend in the ecosystem,
SID decided to create a special track on Augmented and Virtual Reality for Display Week 2016. The rich lineup included a short course, a seminar, a number
of invited and contributed presentations in the symposium, and demonstrations on the exhibit floor.

It is just what the display industry needed to be on the
verge of a massive rejuvenation!

Displays are the face of some of the most used electronic
devices in our daily lives – such as the smartphone, tablet, laptop, monitor, and TV, among numerous other examples. As such, the health of the display industry
rises and falls with the growth and saturation of these devices. Take the exciting
phase of innovation in LCD TV technology as an example. The screen size went from
24 in. to 32 in. to 40 in. to 55 in. to 80 in. and above! The resolution went from 720p to
full HD to QHD and beyond, whereas the frame rates went from 60 to 120 frames
per second. And there were many more advances – contrast, brightness, color, etc. However, it
gets to a point where further advances in display technology provide only
small incremental benefits to the consumer. This often leads to a reduced demand
for new features and a slowdown in the development.

Let’s now turn to virtual reality. It’s a completely
different story at the moment. The displays on the best, state-of-the-art, VR
devices today fall way short of the specifications required for truly immersive
and responsive experiences, despite the dizzying pace of development. The pixel
density needs to increase significantly and latencies must be reduced drastically,
along with many other improvements such as increased field of view, reduced
pixel persistence, higher frame-rates, etc. Besides the display, the systems
also require integration of accurate sensing and tracking technologies. Augmented
reality devices impose additional requirements.

So this is exciting for the researchers and engineers in the
industry. Back to solving some difficult challenges, with the potential for big
returns. Judging by the excellent quality of the papers, presentations, and
exhibitions at the Display Week, it’s obvious the display ecosystem is all
geared up. Game on! – Achin Bhowmik

There are good very-low-power monochrome reflective displays with slow redraw times and, with the introduction of E Ink's color display, there is now a good low-power color reflective display with very slow redraw times.

What we have not had is a reflective video-rate display, and for good reasons. The only reflective technology that has proved to have both broad application and business feasibility has been electrophoretic (think E Ink), and electrophoretic displays operate by moving charged particles slowly through a significant fluid layer. The redraw time cannot be fast. (Well, it can be faster, but then the charged particles collide violently and tear each apart, with unfortunate results.)

CLEARink has turned the conventional electrophoretic model on its head. Very very briefly, the CLEARink display has a thin optical plate with lenslets on the inner surface. In the white state, incoming light experiences total internal reflection (TIR) and returns to the viewer. Reflectivity is an impressive 60%.

How does the display form a black pixel? Lurking behind the optical plate in an "ink" are black particles that are moved toward or away from the plate. When the particles touch the plate (that's a bit sloppy, but close enough for a blog), the TIR is defeated and light at that point is absorbed.

Clever, you say, but it's still electrophoresis, with a particle being moved through a fluid. How can that produce video rate? Because there's something I haven't mentioned yet. The particle only has to move through 0. 5 micron to be "touching" or "not touching" the plate, and that very small distance can be traversed rapidly.

All of this has been public for a least several weeks, but at Display Week, the company showed technology demonstrations in its suite. To demonstrate the monocrome video-rate display, CLEARink engineers had purchased a Kobo eReader, and simply replaced the E Ink imaging film with their own. With the application of a video signal, the display showed very clean, 30 fps video with the subjectively good contrast and that bright 60% reflectivity. CEO Frank Christiaens to the opportunity to note that the technology is compatible with pretty much any backplane and requires no precision alignment.

Although my colleague Bob Raikes and I were extremely impressed with this demo, Christiaens didn't want us to neglect that fact that color via matrix color filter is part of the company's mid-term road-map. Demos were effective. Using an MCF with an otherwise monochrome EPD has not been a satisfying approach in the past because too much of the reflective light was absorbed. The difference here is that CLEARink starts out with 60% reflectivity rather than 40%.

So, said Christiaens, CLEARink will soon be providing something that has never before been available: a reflective color video-rate display.

Walking back to the Moscone Center after our meeting, Raikes and I agreed that the term "game-changing" is used far too often, but that it legitimately applies here. This fast EPD can enable new applications that cannot be realized by existing display technologies. -- Ken Werner

There was a time when watches seemed to go out of fashion.
Everyone knew the time by looking at their mobile phone screen. In the last
couple of years, “connected watches” have become a wearable part of the mobile
ecosystem, as their design has approached that of classic wristwatches. The
intuitive round-faced hand dial watch user interface has pulled through, once
again.

How has this development come about? Weren’t we satisfied
with the function of the square-screen Android devices that appeared on the
market about 5 years ago? Apparently not.

The wearables offering on the exhibition show floor featured
many round-faced watch-sized displays. The Withings activity monitor, for
instance, was featured in the E Ink booth. It sported a reflective e-paper
display, in a round design.

Assuming that customer demand drives the adoption of
consumer devices, once the technology to realize these is available, we can
infer from the exhibits shown that there is a demand to minimize the bezel and
dead space in a watch form factor display. Companies are striving to provide a bezelless design similar to what has become possible in mobile phone displays.
This is much more difficult using a round shape. AUO showed in two symposium
presentations how this can be done using a plastic substrate display. Instead
of placing the driver chip on the face of the display, in a ledge, or using a
TAB lead, they bend the flexible substrate itself to place the driver at the
backside of the display. This way a bezel of 2.2 mm can be achieved, with
clever gate driver placement and bringing the power lines into the active area
from the opposite side of the display face.

Another direction in the development of wearables is to
introduce a band form factor display that wraps around the user’s wrist.
Canatu, the Finnish touch panel maker, had an E Ink based display device from
Wove on its stand.

Wove wrist device with Canatu
integrated touch system.

The touch panel was assembled in an “on-screen” touch
fashion to make a complete, integral structure without any separate outside
encapsulation. The whole module thickness is only 0.162 mm, according to the press
release.

So, it seems like the technical capabilities in displays are
coming to terms to satisfy user needs in wearable devices. With the
round-faced and band-shaped form factors making it possible to wear a watch
again, the “Internet of Designs” can begin. –Jyrki Kimmel for Information
Display

Orbbec Technology found its way through the rigorous
committee selection process and into the I-Zone this year at Display Week. The
Shenzhen, China, based company has 3D camera
technology that Business Development Manager Agnes Zheng claims offers higher
accuracy, lower power, and easier connectivity to more operating systems than
the flagship Microsoft Connect II. Zheng has a masters in mechanical
engineering specializing in optical measurement. She was part of the group that
spun out of a university research project with its IR laser sensor technology that she claims can measure objects at 1 meter with accuracy levels at 1-3 mm
in measurement of size and distance to the object.

"The laser sensor we use has a narrow bandwidth laser
light that does not get absorbed by dark surfaces. We designed it in-house and
have it specially made for this product," Zheng said. They also added an
improved bandwidth filter and improved algorithms, all contributing to the
higher accuracy performance.

The group has support not just for Windows,(it's Windows
exclusively on the Connect II), but also Android and Unix platform
development. It also will sell an OEM module for individual
product design projects and integration into multiple devices including LCD- and
OLED-based TVs. Power is another advantage over the popular MS Connect II, as
the Orbbec 3D camera runs off a standard USB2 connection with 1.8W maximum draw,
far lower than the MS 5.0 W requirement.

The retail version of the product is $150 and requires no
power adapter, putting the Orbbec at parity with Connect II when the price of
the external power adapter is added on to the $99.

Microsoft moved to a time of flight (ToF) model in the
Connect II while Orbbec uses a unique dot pattern the company designed
using the structured light approach. Zheng told us Orbbec has global patents on this technology.

Meanwhile, back in the I-Zone, users had a blast using motion
detection to control the Sony HD flatscreen, playing real-time games and
showing off just how accurate 3D gesture recognition can be. -- Steve Sechrist

Thursday, May 26, 2016

Display Week's Best in Show small exhibit winner DigiLens is looking to do no less than change everything about how AR/VR
interfaces with humans.

DigiLens had a killer demo that was one of the most popular at the show -- you got to check out their technology from the back of a BMW motorcycle.

The group, founded by Dr. Jonathan Waldren, CTO, says its holographic optics based on the new composite material solve the
latency issues around eye tracking with the company's switchable Brag Grating approach
(as opposed to surface relief grating.) It delivers a ground breaking 40-degree
field of view spec (versus 25- to 30-degrees using conventional methods) with
an upside potential for 50-degrees by the end of the year, and up to 90-degrees
in the future.

A specially equipped motorcycle helmet served as the interface.

Waldren showed us his version of the future, in which a person's
gaze is constantly being tracked by a non-intrusive AR or VR system, feeding
that data to the system at very low latency. "This is early days, think
Steve Jobs in the Xerox PARC lab seeing the mouse interface for the first
time.

The nano materials breakthrough "...allows development
of holographic system with an 8X higher index," Waldren said. The coming
world of AR/VR (augmented and virtual reality) will gain an immeasurable boost
from a low latency visual system that both delivers the image and knows exactly
where the user is looking. The display not only shows content, but discerns
user intent, augmenting and responding in a natural hands-free mode. And just
as the mouse empowered a whole new graphic user interface, decades ago,
reliable gaze and eye tracking technology has the potential to change
everything yet again. -- Steve Sechrist

The Internet of Things is here, as experienced in the SAP Center in San Jose during Display Week at the pregame lightshow. The spectators were handed out wristbands with LEDs, synchronized via a radio interface. The wristbands also had a motion sensor so they would light up in Sharks teal when shaken about. The audience participation helped the Sharks to a 5-2 win over the Saint Louis Blues! –Jyrki Kimmel for Information Display

Spectators at a San Jose Sharks game create a light show with synchronized, color-changing wristbands.

Whereas large, high-definition displays usually get people's attention, there is a diminutive class of
displays that virtually everyone takes for granted. Mobile
phones have interactive displays that a vast majority of SID show attendees use daily, without giving them a second thought. The quality of mobile
displays today rivals that of TVs and in many parameters exceeds them.
Some key trends in mobile displays were highlighted in the SID Symposium
keynotes as well as in the introductory talk for the Market Focus Conference on
Touch.

Hiroyuki Oshima of Japan Display Inc. (JDI) gave the conference keynote on mobile
displays, highlighting JDI’s strategy to concentrate on core technologies. One
of these is an in-cell touch-based user interface. Other core technologies from
JDI include LTPS and IPS, which support the touch functionality that will take on new
capabilities. JDI sees the future growth for display business in new
applications as the mobile phone market saturates.

A mobile display from JDI (photos by Jyrki Kimmel).

Calvin Hsieh from IHS gave the lead presentation in the
Market Conference on Touch. In the IHS forecast, in-cell touch for AMLCD and
on-cell touch for AMOLED play a large role, shown in projected growth for
these technologies. For touch in general as well, new applications drive the
growth of the business.

What new applications are there for mobile displays and for
touch technologies? A lot of these rely on sensors that are being integrated
into the module itself. These sensors give the mobile display capability for
multimodal user interaction, from fingerprint and proximity sensing to hover
touch. These interaction modalities can then be leveraged over a wide range of
application areas, even in automotive use.

Another trend is the proliferation of organic form factors
in small and mobile displays. Sharp comes into this area from another
direction, taking the form language from its automotive curve-edged displays
and transforming mobile-sized displays from rectangular to round and
oval-shaped objects.

Sharp has been specializing in "non-traditional" display shapes.

These new form factors, combined with curved
display integration, led by Samsung, open a way for totally new device classes,
beyond the mobile phone and rectangular, passive information screens in cars.

Samsung is also experimenting with some interesting form factors.

From the presentations in the conferences and modules shown
in the exhibition booths, it seems that the predicted curved and flexible
displays are still as far in the future as roadmaps depicted a few years ago.
Prototypes of “rollable” screens are becoming ubiquitous but real products are
still beyond the horizon. Until we get there, there will be many advancements
in “classic” mobile display technologies that in turn can propagate to other
application areas, making developments in mobile displays the vanguard of
evolution in display technology. Sensor and system integration as well as touch
user interface evolution will play a major role as constituent technologies in
this development. –Jyrki Kimmel for Information Display